Jon Toigo
	Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC.

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06 oktober 2011 - Childish dream

To paraphrase the famous American folk novelist Mark Twain: of all the things I’ve sacrificed in the course of parenting six children, I miss my mind the most. I know raising kids is portrayed as a joyous and life-fulfilling experience, but those who have been there know that it is not without its challenges—especially when the children begin their own journey into adulthood. This time is ­marked by two things: extraordinary perception of basic realities, even if these are cast simplistically in black and white, and rebellion against all authority.

The former characteristic, the ability to perceive basic realities, leads to a condemnation of the way things are and clarity about how they should be. The latter, rebellion, often engenders rejection of any nuanced explanations for the status quo and refusal of ­authorities that have allowed an imperfect status quo to persist.

I think about these things as I read reports of VMware’s planned initiatives for storage. Like the teenager, they have become a handful for their parent company and majority stockholder, EMC. Many in the industry are wondering when Hopkinton will exert its parental control over the server hypervisor company. Others simply delight in the audacity of a technology company that takes up a big bullhorn to tell it like it is.

Cynical
VMware has already made some storage-related moves that many observers, including myself, consider to be cynical, self-serving and misguided. For example, they arbitrarily added the VAAI commands to the SCSI command set without going through the proper channels to get their new primitives accepted. The ANSI approval process, as slow-moving and flawed as it may be, is what keeps SCSI a standard—something that works across all platforms and in the majority of use cases. VAAI was essentially a trick by VMware to try and alleviate the logjam which its hypervisor created by bundling all the I/O streams that guest machines send to the storage infrastructure. Offloading certain storage activities to so-called smart array controllers, they said, would cause a 20 per cent reduc­tion in the workload-processing requirements faced by VMware’s hypervisor. That was a desirable, if self-serving goal, given the in­creasing noise level of customers complaining about the slow performance of their guest machines.

Breaking with the tradition of seeking formal approval for modifying the standards-based SCSI protocol was just the beginning. VMware’s implementation also left something to be desired. According to reports I have received, VMware sprung the new SCSI primitives on the storage vendors without warning—not even to parent company EMC. They then again changed their quasi-standard primitives with no prior notice, thereby driving many engineers and array-makers nuts.

As a parent, I know that kids are like that. They ignore the lame protocols of their elders and seek to fix things through immediate actions that, while providing instant gratification, are often poorly thought through in terms of their broader consequences. What happens if a VMware customer also has Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer deployed? Are we now required to build a separate infrastructure to handle non-standard SCSI commands just for the VMware servers and their guest apps? Must their storage be segregated from other storage that only supports workloads from non-VMware machines? Kids don’t consider such things; adults must.

Ugly reality
Storage array architects perceive VMware’s latest move as a threat. At VMworld, engineers proudly proclaimed that they were bent on moving all array controller functionality, including RAID and other functions that need to be done close to disk, into their software stack. Customers should just deploy JBODs and let the hypervisor do the rest. I wonder what EMC thinks of that bit of wisdom from its golden stepchild.

Truth be told: VMware, like a teen, sees the ugly reality of storage, a mess of different architectures and topologies, services joined at the hip to proprietary controllers that isolate data and functionality on island arrays. They correctly perceive that this must be addressed if we are ever going to get to a sensible resource allocation model for storage with financial sustainability. They are also rebellious enough to believe that 1) “VMware is not a product, but a movement” and 2) the corruption of the storage industry needs to be rooted out by bold, sweeping change. The question that should be asked is whether a VMware world would be any different from the status quo in the end. Remember, VM­ware’s initiatives to fix what ails storage can only work if all workloads are guested in their hypervisor—a childish dream at best.

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22-02-2012 - Europees MKB benut opslagcapaciteit onvoldoende
Van alle kleine Europese bedrijven met 100 of minder werknemers heeft slechts 2 procent alle bedrijfstoepassingen naar de cloud gemigreerd. 85 procent heeft bedenkingen over een dergelijke stap. Dit blijkt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van Dell en Intel.
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